Walking through this square a few weeks ago, I had the pleasant surprise of finding it invaded by boys playing soccer, producing a noisy liveliness that I wasn't expecting in this part of the city placed between the railway and the boulevards, a sort of island amid the streams, made of quiet spaces, eclectic houses, early Nineteenth century blocks.
When I came back there in order to make this watercolour, in the hottest hour of a midsummer day, I found a very different atmosphere: the square was half deserted, the benches empty, no voice was echoing in the air.
Only the thin pines of the central garden seemed alive; looking at their oblique trunks and at their foliage challenging the hot sun to offer the square some spot of shade, I had a feeling that their unstable poses, although blocked in extreme immobility, were forming the steps of a dance.

In these days of intense heat, if I decide to walk through the city in the central hours of the day, I'm glad to choose the narrowest streets, the ones that can offer shadow and pleasant freshness if they are favoured by the right orientation; and it doesn't matter if one doesn't meet catchy shops and shop windows there: one can always look up and be intrigued observing the windows that now show, now hide details of unknown lives and activities.In this street situated halfway between the Duomo and the church of Santa Maria Novella, I couldn't resist the silent call of these windows with their shutters wide open in the shadow, under which I almost felt as if I had crossed, indiscreet, the borders of a private space.